Smoke Road

by Toby Neal

  Why wasn’t the vaccine working? What was Dr. Deceitful keeping from him?

  Luca got up and walked to the supply closet. The body bags were gone, but he was checking again just in case.

  They’d have to wrap Jaguar in his sheets to bury him.

  Luca closed the supply room door and leaned against one of the empty shelves. He rested his forehead on his hands and closed his eyes, allowing the waves of fear, grief, and remorse to wash over him.

  He’d lost another brother. How many more would be gone before this plague ended... all of them? He’d tried his family in Philadelphia and couldn’t get through. For all Luca knew, his entire family was already dead.

  The door opened and Nani stood in the square of light. She stepped into the room and his body rose to her, alive with new sensations in spite of everything.

  What they’d shared before the men fell sick had left a deep, hungry ache in him. It wasn’t just that he wanted to kiss and taste her again, to feel her body against his, matching his strength. No, it was more than that; he wanted something from her, and to give to her. The whole thing had been unbelievable and that pissed him off.

  How could he want her when the men were dying?

  Earlier, as he’d brought a glass of water to Big Nate’s mouth, Luca thought of Nani’s tongue tangling with his, the sweet scent of her, the way she moaned, her hands in his hair, crying out his name. Nathan Stolen, Engineer Sergeant, was dying and Luca was thinking about the soft flesh of Dr. Dangerous.

  Luca Luciano was a sinner.

  “Jaguar’s gone,” Luca told Nani.

  She nodded. Dark circles under her eyes just made her look more beautiful, like the survivor she was—it turned him on. Neither of them had slept in 36 hours as side by side they’d tended to the men. In the shadows of the closet, he could see it catching up to her.

  “I think they’re all going to die,” she whispered.

  “How’s that possible? What about the vaccine?”

  She just shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  Anger flushed through him, pushing all other emotions aside, shoving it into the corners of his being. Anger was in control again. Anger would shield him from her. Luca pushed upright, his body pulsing with new energy. “How can you say that? You’re lying.”

  Her eyes opened wide and her lips parted with a little sound of surprise. “I’m telling the truth. I don’t know what’s going on with the virus or the vaccine, and I don’t have a lab to find out.”

  “You’re keeping something from me. I know you are.” He took a step toward her, hands curling into fists.

  Nani straightened, her eyes brightening with answering temper. “I’m not keeping anything from you. I was given the vaccine and clearly it’s no longer working. Part of this virus’s danger is its ability to mutate. That’s what successful viruses do, they adapt.”

  “You know so much about successful viruses, don’t you?” he snorted. “Dr. Expert.”

  “Luca.” She reached out to touch him, but he stepped away, his shoulder knocking one of the metal shelves. “I’m so sorry that your friend died.”

  “He was more than my friend.” Luca’s voice broke. He turned away from her, his fist punching out, connecting with the shelf. The metal rang from the contact and pain shot up his knuckles through his wrist, centering in his elbow and seeping into his shoulder.

  It felt good. He should be in pain.

  “This disease...” She stopped speaking. He heard the small whisper of a sob. Luca whirled around, facing her. Nani’s hands covered her face and her shoulders shook.

  She was crying.

  Luca enveloped her. His body just wrapped itself around her without conscious thought. He pulled her into his chest, tangled her braid around his fist, stroked her back and whispered into her ear. “Shhh, don’t cry.” God, she felt good against him. Everything about her fit, filled in his nooks and crannies as he did hers.

  She sobbed harder, her body shaking under his grasp.

  Pain of loss is sharp

  Fleeting heart comes to a stop

  She is all I want

  “I’m sorry.” She snuggled into his chest, clinging, all soft woman and sweet scent. “I’m so sorry.”

  Luca’s hand tightened on her braid, pulling back so that her chin lifted. His lips found hers, caressing them softly, tasting her salty tears. Her hands reached up and grasped the back of his neck, her blunt nails digging into the tender flesh, sending twinges of painful pleasure through his body, tightening his abs, nipples, groin. She moaned, deepening the kiss, as desperation heated between them.

  He lifted her up and she wrapped her legs around his waist—they were not two separate bodies coming together—they were one body which had been split apart and was now reuniting.

  Hunger raged between them. Nani clinging to him was the only thing keeping Luca from floating off the planet. He longed to find oblivion, to burn to ashes as she went up in flames. He was about to drop to his knees, his body taking over, when she broke free of him, sliding her legs down beside his.

  “We have to get back.” Her voice was raspy, her breath coming in pants.

  His hands were full of her, one grasping the hard globe of her buttock, the other twisted tightly in her braid.

  He didn’t want to go back out there. Not yet. He needed her first—he needed to be inside her.

  But she was wriggling free of him, pushing him away, leaving him again, just like she had in the sparring ring, a loss he’d felt in his bones.

  She had him totally out of control, ready to fuck her in a closet while his friends died. This had to stop. His hands unclenched, releasing her. Luca stepped back and rubbed his face.

  “We have to bury them.” Nani brought him back to reality.

  “I know.” He pressed his left knuckle against his thigh, digging into the shrapnel.

  “I’ll stay here with the other men if you want to see about digging a grave.”

  Their eyes found each other—strangers made intimate by death and disease. Was it the stress of their situation that made her so important to him? Or had he found his true love during the apocalypse?

  He didn’t want to know the answer. He was afraid to even think about it, with life so fragile.

  The parade ground was a mound of dirt, the size of it nauseating with so many gone.

  A backhoe, the keys in the ignition, was parked next to the mass grave. Luca climbed into the construction vehicle and, after some trial and error, figured out how to drive the big machine.

  His men would not be buried in the parade ground with the others. He was putting them in the obstacle course. It was where they’d bonded together, where they’d laughed and challenged themselves and each other. He wished that he could bring them home, let them be put to rest by their families but that wasn’t possible. The obstacle course was the best Luca could do.

  He dug a hole, deeper and wider than necessary for Jaguar’s body, knowing that the other men would join their leader. The earthy scent of turned soil reminded him of his mother and her garden in their yard in Philadelphia. Luca fought back the fear that she was gone, that everyone was gone but him.

  As he stepped back into the infirmary, the stench of death, astringent and putrid, brought him back to the present. Nani was pulling a sheet over Tug’s face. There was already one over Big Nate’s body. Just Freckles, Biscuit and D. Love remained. All of them shook with fever, their jaws trembling, and their teeth chattering.

  Peaches approached, sitting by Luca’s side and leaning her warm weight against him. Nani’s gaze found his over her mask. She gave a little shake of her head.

  She was hiding something. She’d cried to stop his interrogation, tricked him into kissing her instead of getting to the bottom of why his men were dying. He wanted answers.

  Dr. Duplicity stood up and went to Freckles’s bedside. Pushing the redhead’s hair from his brow, Nani laid a cool compress over it. Freckles wasn’t coughing anymore. He was hardly breathing now
, his body vibrating with chills from the fever.

  D. Love yelled suddenly, and his arms flew up as if protecting himself from a blow. Luca rushed to the man’s side, Peaches glued to his thigh.

  “Put on gloves before you touch him.” Nani ordered.

  Luca’s hands hovered above Long, wanting to reach out and hold the man’s arms, keep him from hitting himself, but Nani’s words froze Luca in place. “I already gave Jaguar CPR. If I’m exposed, it’s already too late.”

  “No! We don’t know how many strains there are. Ten percent of the population are naturally immune, and you may be but please don’t take any more chances. Please.” Her tilted dark eyes over the mask burned with passion. She cared about him.

  Or maybe she just needed someone with muscle to survive out here.

  Nani handed him gloves and he pulled them on. They were way too tight, cutting off the circulation to his wrists. Luca grabbed D. Love’s arms, holding him down, and murmuring soothing words as he’d done for Jaguar less than an hour ago.

  Would this friend die under his touch as well?

  Bravery and strength,

  Time to embrace your lost faith

  Cool winds of autumn.

  Luca recited a haiku. The medic had loved poetry, preferring the work of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to Luca’s short, structured haikus, but it was a passion they had shared. Luca hoped that it would bring his friend some comfort in these final moments.

  Nani placed a mask over Luca’s face, covering his nose and mouth, her deft fingers curling the elastic around his ears.

  Long’s eyes opened and he spoke softly in Chinese. A smile came over his face. A gentle relaxation fell over his body and the shivering stopped. He died, calm and peaceful, in Luca’s grasp.

  Luca stepped back from the body of his friend, his eyes hard and burning.

  Nani placed her hand on Luca’s back and rubbed in small circles.

  His mother had done that same motion to comfort Luca when he was a child. As he stood over the body of his dead friend, Nani rubbing his back in that maternal, familiar way, memories burst across his vision.

  At his father’s funeral, Luca’s mother, still rounded from childbirth, wore a dress that barely contained her. Lucy, just four months old, fussed, her sweet little hand pulling at his mother’s neckline while the priest eulogized their father. And his father’s work friends stared at his mother’s chest. Luca noticed, and hated it.

  At the wake, a jam-packed event at his aunt’s house, the grownups drank and toasted Paulie Luciano, waking Lucy from her nap, fretful and crying. Luca gathered his baby sister up and went looking for his mother.

  He found her in the back yard, pressed up against the fence. His father’s partner was kissing her and fondling her breasts. Lucy was screaming in earnest. His mother broke away to grab the baby while his father’s partner adjusted himself and headed back to the party, not even glancing at Luca.

  Luca stood there, his fists balled with fury, his mother’s betrayal a sick poison he’d lived with ever since; even now, the memory of his mother cheating with another man made blood rush through his veins and his body stiffen in rejection.

  He stepped away from Dr. Duplicity’s touch.

  Nani smelled and tasted of life itself, but she was like all the rest of them.

  Women could not be trusted.

  She’d told him the vaccine would keep him and his men safe.

  She’d lied.

  It was her fault his men were dying.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Haunani

  Nani felt Luca withdraw from her, that steel door coming down tighter than ever. It was just as well, because they couldn’t leave Freckles and Biscuit to die alone while they went into a closet and screwed each other senseless—which was what had almost happened not long ago.

  She knelt by Biscuit, ran a cloth over his forehead, and soothed him with humming. The Hawaii state song was what came to her. The restless tossing and the muscle tremors began to abate as she sang in a language that couldn’t be further from his mother tongue:

  “Hawaii pono e

  Nana e kono e

  Kalani ali`i

  Ke ali`i

  Makua lani e

  Kamehameha e

  Na kaua e pa e

  Mei lani e.”

  Patel exhaled, a long slow breath. It was his last.

  Such long lashes on his tawny cheeks. Almost as long as Cocky Lupo’s.

  Nani glanced over at Luca. He was winding Jaguar in his bed sheet, swaddling him tightly into a cocoon.

  Freckles passed moments later, the lively quiver of his face stilled. By then, it was a relief to see his suffering end.

  Nani couldn’t even cry. She felt nothing but self-loathing for giving way to tears earlier, for needing Luca’s solace so much when it was she who’d signed these men’s death warrants by bringing them on this operation.

  What hadn’t Beauregard and the VP told her? Was the vaccine she’d been given even real? So much about the operation was suspicious, a real setup, with her as the unsuspecting and unprepared scapegoat. She was the perfect person to blame for failing to apprehend Tanner Hillish and his hideous bioterror cult.

  Nani stroked Patel’s damp black locks off of his forehead. She wished that she could believe they were all destined for a better place. Imagining these brave men, each so unique and lovable, drinking and joking around some campfire in an afterlife would give her solace.

  Nani’s father was Buddhist, and her mother Christian. She’d attended church as a child and believed in God until Mikaela’s death.

  Nani had always felt closest to God in nature. Along with her brothers, she explored the natural wonder of their home island. Even now, when Nani thought about the lush jungles, black lava flows, snow-peaked volcanoes, and variety of beaches of the Big Island, she felt a modicum of comfort. The world was a beautiful place, though often harsh and unforgiving.

  What did it cost to believe, now? To hope in something bigger, something eternal, when everything known was crumbling?

  She bent her head over Patel’s still body. “Please do not let these men’s lives to have been in vain. Let their souls find peace.”

  “Amen. Let’s get this nightmare over with and put them in the ground.” Luca was all business.

  Nani’s eyes flew open and she looked up at him. This hard-faced stranger, his eyes dark and hollow, was the same man whose mouth had claimed hers with such electric confidence, such deep communion, just hours before.

  He bent and folded the bedclothes around Patel, rough and quick. “I have a hole dug. We’ll put them in together.”

  She couldn’t find words that held any meaning, so she said nothing.

  Luca walked over to his friend’s bed and picked up Jaguar, cradling the man’s burly body against his chest like it weighed nothing.

  Nani bent and lifted Patel, the smallest of the men but even so, he’d been a fit and solid hundred and fifty pounds. She hefted him onto her shoulder and followed Luca. The sheet cocooning Patel’s body brushed against her cheek with every step and the scent of his stale sweat and sickly body odor filled her nostrils.

  Luca led her to the nearby obstacle training course. The sight of it made her stomach clench, remembering the men that first day helping each other climb a tall wall section much like the one that now sheltered the wide, deep grave Luca had dug with the backhoe.

  He reached the grave and carefully lowered Jaguar’s body to the edge, then slid it in feet first. Jaguar slipped through the black soil to rest at the bottom, and Nani copied what Luca had done to lower Patel in beside him, her back aching with the effort.

  They worked together silently to move the bodies, rolling them to rest with their brothers. Tug was last, and by then Nani was trembling and sweaty with exhaustion.

  “Rest a minute,” Luca recognized that Nani was spent. She sank to the floor beside the man’s sickbed, looping her arms around her knees and resting her head upon them. She must h
ave slept because Luca’s touch on her shoulder woke her with a start, reminding her of medical school when she’d nodded off on rotation as a resident, leaning on a wall.

  “Get his feet.” Luca had fetched a sturdy yellow hand truck, and between the two of them they were able to get Tug’s big body onto it. With Nani holding him in place, Luca pushed the massive man on the dolly all the way to the grave.

  Tug was too big for anything but tipping over into the grave. Nani heard a small, inarticulate cry as his body thumped onto the others, and realized it had come from her own throat.

  Some horrors were just too much to endure, and yet they had to be borne.

  “Go rest.”

  But Nani couldn’t leave Luca, couldn’t leave the men. She settled on the ground beside the hole as Luca climbed onto the backhoe. Exhaust blew over the grave like sulfurous tears. Luca moved the soil mountain beside the grave back into it as Nani knelt, rubbing Mikaela’s beach glass.

  When it was done, he turned the backhoe off and jumped down. He came over, and she saw a string of worn wooden beads in his big hand: a rosary. Luca dropped to his knees beside her, and bowed his head, his voice low and rough as he began a Hail Mary.

  Nani lay down on the soil and listened. His voice was like the murmur of waves lapping on one of her favorite beaches; they’d always sounded like prayers to her.

  She must have fallen asleep again because this time when she woke, Luca was carrying her, one arm around her shoulders, cradling her against him, the other under her legs. The only sound in the world was the thump of his great big heart against her cheek.

  The next time she woke it was to a pounding headache and a cottony grit in her mouth. She reached for Luca, flailing her arms but they met only air.

  She was alone, back in the dead man’s bunk, tucked into her sleeping bag.

  “Luca!” Terror rose in a choking wave. She was alone. He’d died, or left her! She threw the sleeping bag aside and stood up too fast, staggering and catching herself on the wall. “Luca! Luca!”